State-Level Sexism and Gender Disparities in Health Care Access and Quality in the United States.

In this investigation, we examined the associations between state-level structural sexism-a multidimensional index of gender inequities across economic, political, and cultural domains of the gender system-and health care access and quality among women and men in the United States. We linked administrative data gauging state-level gender gaps in pay, employment, poverty, political representation, and policy protections to individual-level data on health care availability, affordability, and quality from the national Consumer Survey of Health Care Access (2014-2019; N = 24,250). Results show that higher state-level sexism is associated with greater inability to access needed health care and more barriers to affording care for women but not for men.